..The data indicate that (a) rats can distinguish both food-deprived and protein-deprived rats from replete rats and (b) the deprivation states of rats can affect their willingness to affiliate with deprived conspecifics...

Animal traditions: experimental evidence of learning by imitation in an unlikely animal

..A new field study provides the first experimental evidence of learning by imitation in a free-living animal and demonstrates that social learning can maintain two behavioral traditions in a single population...

Laboratory studies of imitation/field studies of tradition: Towards a synthesis in animal social learning

..Armchair analyses of field data can produce interesting hypotheses but cannot test them. Field experiments to determine how behaviors of interest develop in population members provide a promising way forward...

Differences between golden hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus) and Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) in preference for the sole diet that they are eating

..Patterns of affiliation and of mating in a confining laboratory apparatus thus predicted behavior in a larger enclosure that provided female quail with opportunity to avoid contact with male quail...

..This short-term increase in observer intake of unfamiliar foods appeared to result from socially-induced motivation to ingest unfamiliar foods rather than from socially-induced reduction in neophobia...

..We speculate on the reasons why a male's response to pups might be affected by his exposure to a pregnant female and stimuli from pups, but not by the probability that the pups were his own offspring...

Sex and intrauterine position influence the size of the gerbil hippocampus